Artflow Studio just released Artflow – Sketch, Paint, Draw for Android tablets, which will bring out your creative side. Of course if you’re already a creative person, you will love it too. Artflow is easy enough for the novice, but offers features for the pro as well. It has all the standard stuff like 50 different brushes/tools and color selections, but it also offers layers and advanced controls like smudging and brush flow. It even supports pressure sensitive pens like Samsung’s S Pen on the Galaxy Note 10.1 or the Galaxy Note 8.0.

What I like most about Artflow is that the Holo-inspired layout and controls are very simple. Drawing and sketching apps can be a little intimidating for the casual user, but not with Artflow. Upon opening the app, you are given a completely white slate for your next sketch. You will find two menus, one at the right edge and the other at the left edge. Just tap on the “less than sign” at the middle right edge or the “greater than sign” at the middle left edge to open the respective menus.

Privacy is a major buzzword these days and sometimes you want to be able to keep and/or do things on your phone that you don’t want others to know about. You will find plenty of apps that help you in this regard, but most of them only do one thing. What makes a great app is one that is not only simple to use, but also offers a lot of features, and Privacy Manager offers both. Privacy manager will do some of the simple stuff like keep certain pictures, apps, and contacts private, but it offers so much more. Privacy manager will also block certain numbers from calling you, disguise calls or SMS messages when you don’t want others to know exactly who is calling you, Ring your phone with a fake call when you need to be “interrupted” in a meeting. It even offers a password manager and let’s not forget the ability to record from your phone’s handsfree microphone. Privacy Manager has pretty much everything you could ever want, and then some.

Do you like to watch a lot of videos online? Do you get annoyed with having to use up your mobile data all the time or dealing with buffers? Well I have an app for you, it’s called PAUL the app, and it was developed by Inmobly. PAUL will curate videos and music for you from many popular sites and download them to your phone or tablet via WiFi so that you don’t have to use up mobile data or deal with any hiccups.

Before we get into the particulars, you are probably wondering where the name “PAUL” came from. Paul was an octopus in Germany that became famous for his predictions during the World Cup in 2010. He not only picked Spain as the World Cup champion, he also picked 85% of the matches correctly. What does that have to do with this app? Well PAUL The App’s algorithms are inspired by Paul the octopus with the goal being to successfully deliver videos and music that you want to watch or listen to. In fact, they created an acronym based on PAUL – Predictive Automated User-centric Loading.

Do you find yourself with a bunch of videos and pictures with no organization in sight? Do you wish you had the time to edit them and make them more meaningful? Then look no further because I have an app for you. It’s called WeVideo and it’s a very simple video editor for your Android phone. As people are starting to use their phones more and more for both videos and pictures, an app like this is a must have.

WeVideo is actually an online editing tool, but now you get many of the same features on your Android phone at basically no cost. I know what you’re thinking. You are saying to yourself that this is just going to be another app that is complicated, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Trust me, within minutes you will have some really cool videos.

Have you ever wanted to send and receive SMS text messages from your tablet? There are a number of apps available in the Google Play store that will allow you to do this, but I wanted to tell you about a newer one called Dinamotxt. It was developed by Openmind, and it syncs your tablet with your phone so that your tablet will receive SMS text messages at the same time as your phone.

Dinamotxt is a full texting interface so you will have all the same capabilities as if you were using your phone. You can not only reply to current texts, but you can also create new conversations from your contacts or any phone number. You can also change the look with the included themes. They have eight colors to choose from along with a nice looking paper and vanilla theme. You can delete any threads you no longer need, and they will be deleted from your phone at the same time.

Every now and then it’s nice to play an 8-bit game on your Android device, but how about an 8-bit live wallpaper? That’s exactly what inHause Games created with Live Pixels. We are already familiar with inHause Games as we previously reviewed their other awesome live wallpaper called YourCity 3D. Live Pixels is actually a bunch of live wallpapers and you can choose which ones you want to display on your homescreen. It’s got everything from fireworks, explosions, and even a flying cat. There are 14 in all:

When it comes to installing an app on your phone or tablet, one of the most important things you need to look at is permissions. We have covered a few apps that help you with that, but online permissions is one that people often overlook. Online permissions pertains to various online social sites and what apps you have granted access to them. For example, if you use a third party Twitter app, you have to allow that app access to your Twitter account. This goes for any app that needs to communicate with Twitter or other similar sites like Facebook, Instagram, Google, Dropbox, Linkedin, Yahoo, Instagram, Foursquare, and Flickr.

All of these sites will tell you what other applications were previously granted access, but they aren’t always easy to find, so most people never bother with them. An app called MyPermissions will make things very easy for you in that you can find all the permissions for all of these sites in one place. Now you might be thinking to yourself that if you granted access to a particular application, then it’s okay and there’s no reason to worry about it. You are partly right, but you will be surprised at how many older applications you will find that were granted permission, but you no longer use. You are also likely to find permissions for things you didn’t even realize that you granted. Now I’m not going to tell you that if you leave these old permissions in place, something awful is going to happen to you, but at the same time, why leave permissions in place that are no longer necessary? These services will have access to all your private information, but you don’t use them anymore. It doesn’t make sense does it?

IObit says their Advanced Mobile Care app is a swiss army knife of Android tuning tools, and they aren’t kidding. From security to performance, there isn’t much this app doesn’t do. It’s actually been out for a while, but they just updated to 3.0 to include anti-theft protection, a call blocker, tablet support, and an improved battery saver.

This all-in-one app features real-time virus scans, anti-theft protection, a game speeder, battery saver, call blocker, app manager, task killer, privacy locker, privacy advisor, and cloud backup. Now you would expect with all these features, it has to be complicated, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Advanced Mobile Care’s UI is elegant, and simple to navigate. It’s the perfect app for not only the expert, but the novice as well.

We’ve covered a few apps that help with security for children’s phones, but I wanted to tell you about another one I came across called MMGuardian Parental Control from MMGuardian.com. It seems like the age that kids are given phones is getting younger and younger as time goes on. Of course you can give them a dumbphone, but with newer shared plans, it’s not out of reach to go for a smartphone. For some kids it might be an overkill, but a smartphone can give you a lot of features like knowing your child’s whereabouts, and with apps like MMGuardian Parental Control, it gives you the peace of mind you need when you give that shiny new or used smartphone to your child.

I think when it comes to apps such as these, a lot of parents don’t want to bother with them because they think it will be overwhelming and difficult to set up. I think that’s true for a lot of these apps, but nothing could be further from the truth regarding MMGuardian. All you really need to do is install the app on your child’s phone and activate it with your password of choice. Then it’s a matter of going through each area of the app that you want to control. Your child won’t be able to uninstall or deactivate the app without the password.

Todoist has always been one of the best personal task managers, but it was only available on the desktop until November of last year. That’s when Doist released native apps for both Android and iOS, which brought Todoist’s robust elements to users for on-the-go task management. With the addition of the app, Todoist users are now synced across nine platforms, which include Android, iOS, Web, Chrome, Firefox, Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows, and Mac.

I generally don’t use the desktop to manage my tasks, although it’s important to me that the tasks are synced and accessible from various platforms. With that said, the desktop Web interface is a tremendous application for those that really need a lot of control for their tasks. The Todoist app for Android brings most of those features to your phone or tablet.